


To the day we burned maps

by Dayadhvam



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel, Clairestiel, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-27
Updated: 2011-06-27
Packaged: 2017-12-26 21:38:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 20,100
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970558
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dayadhvam/pseuds/Dayadhvam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>S1 AU. Too many parties are keeping tabs on the Winchesters, whether they be the FBI, the yellow-eyed demon, or an angel gone rogue from Heaven. The future stalks Sam in his nightmares while a demon stalks his girlfriend Jess, but as Dean and John head to Palo Alto with the law hard on their heels, one fundamental principle is at play for them all: you have to try to save the ones you love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. carved into arrows

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the 2011 spn_j2_bigbang. Fic and chapter titles are from Fatima Lim-Wilson's "[Translations of Love](http://breathe-poetry.livejournal.com/505844.html)"; [art](http://roque-clasique.livejournal.com/123089.html) by roque_clasique; spoilers up to the 5x04!verse. Many thanks to kalliel and jaimeykay for their feedback during the writing process!

_“Look—bang bang, you’re dead. That’s all there is to it.” She slots a magazine into her semiautomatic without hesitation, the ease of an action repeated too many times to count. Her skin pulls taut over her cheekbones like tanned deer hide, dipping into the dark circles under her eyes. “You get them in the head first before they get you.”_

_“But I’m not,” he says._

_“Right. Excuse you?” Risa arches her eyebrows, the ghosts of questions present._

_And Castiel slowly taps the hollow at the base of his throat—once, twice—says, “I’m not dead.”_

*

HENRIKSEN: You’re a funny guy, Winchester. Not trying hard to fly under the radar with this crap, are you? Looks like you’re stuck with me, and you won’t like it one bit.

WINCHESTER: You saying I can’t get anything outta this—like a beer? A man needs a goddamn beer every once in a while.

HENRIKSEN: You ain’t getting a beer till you tell me where your father is.

WINCHESTER: [silence]

HENRIKSEN: You’ll be thirsty for a while, you know.

WINCHESTER: Yeah, I can deal with that.

HENRIKSEN: Three dead girls, Winchester, and you were about to make their bodies into a celebratory bonfire, of all the messed up things you could do. Caught in the act. Where’s the one who got away? I should bring her in and thank her for leading us to you.

WINCHESTER: I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about.

HENRIKSEN: You don’t need to pretend about girl number four. We tracked her into the woods, who knows how much you traumatized her. You can tell now and spare us the trouble, else I’m sure we’ll find some girl missing from a nearby town and identify her. You really are a piece of work. You haven’t done a half-bad job at covering your tracks, but it’s all falling apart now.

WINCHESTER: Gotta say, I like to think I live to be a pain in someone’s ass. [pause] A very good pain.

HENRIKSEN: [pause] Well. It’s not going to last forever. We’ll take you to your cell—[lights dim; HENRIKSEN glances up briefly, pushes his chair back]—so you can just squat there for now.

[Lights start flickering, buzzing sound grows prominent]

REIDY: [off-screen] Victor—

HENRIKSEN: What’s going on—[WINCHESTER begins to stand]—Winchester! Sit down. You’re going nowhere.

REIDY: [background] Excuse me, you’re not cleared to enter—

[static]

[FILE: WINCHESTER, DEAN - security tape  
Date: 20 October 2005, 8:32 pm CST  
Location: Kankakee, IL]

*

For the fifth time: “This is John Winchester. If this is an emergency, call my son Dean at 866-907-3235.” _Beep._

“Fuck it, answer the goddamn thing,” he said aloud to the ceiling, and grimaced as he slammed the hotel phone down. The clock on the nearby nightstand blinked innocently at him as the numbers inched closer to midnight—as if, at any moment, the spell would break, and Dean would wake up in a world where the entire night had never, ever happened.

“He usually doesn’t pick up, then.” Not a question there. The girl wasn’t much of a talker, her voice soft and scratchy like scuffed felt.

“Busy,” Dean said shortly. “We’ve got other hunts out there besides this, you know.” It had been a routine split—Dad heading up to Wisconsin on the track of reports that lined up with a werewolf, Dean swerving off to tackle a ghost’s serial spree in Illinois. Neither of them could’ve expected anything to go haywire like this.

She rotated her face around, slick as an oiled gear. “Yes,” she said, folding her hands together. “I understand. I saw.”

“... right. And you don’t see anything else? Who got me out, who...?”

“No.” She didn’t look at him. “I just knew where to find you.” She pulled her shoulders forward, shrugged, and then brought her stare around to fix upon him.

Dean had to look away. _Can’t read your mind_ , he reminded himself. But it was not a coincidence they were sitting on opposite sides of the room; Dean had been sure to pick the one closer to the door. John Winchester rarely had a kind word for psychics—though, Dean conceded, he rarely had a cruel word either. Bad form, if Dean were to up and leave her like that when she’d been the one to find and hide him despite the fact that he’d been unconscious and labeled a murderer on the loose, lighting out with a stolen car and breaking into the motel room. She had been the one to get him caught too, the FBI guy’s “girl number four” who’d been in the woods and made enough noise for the agents to follow, but there was no use getting angry at a psychic who had apparently foreseen your demise at the whims of a ghost otherwise.

Or so she said.

How the fuck had he been busted out of prison? There was absolutely no way that he could just waltz around now with a nickel and dime to spare, considering the pictures of his face infesting WANTED posters and television news. He’d stopped flipping through the news channels. Blah blah blah dangerous and at large blah blah killed three girls blah. Dad was going to be pissed at him for such a monumental cock-up. Fuck, he was pissed at himself. Count them—one two three. It was no coincidence that all three families had suffered mysterious deaths in the past; the ghost which trailed them in the name of vengeance had no inclination to limit itself to one generation. And the FBI would be sure to say it was no coincidence that Dean Winchester had been near the occurrences of all three deaths. The Houdini escape was just another black mark on his record.

“You knew any of them?” he asked, knocking his chair back against the wall, which winked at him in a horrific torrent of chartreuse and purple diamonds. “Classmates?”

She shook her head in the negative; said nothing. She looked about the same age as the dead victims, fifteen or sixteen but too skinny. The look of the underfed hung upon her knobbly elbows and hollowed-out eye sockets, her body a toughly coiled string of wary restraint. She would not have qualified to be one of the ghost’s victims, Dean thought—now they, they lived lives fraught with sibling spats, boy concerns, grade anxieties—knew little of the drowning miseries which the old suicide had borne in silence while alive, and let loose once dead.

If he squinted, he could almost say the ghost wasn’t quite gone yet. Ghosts—they could possess people, couldn’t they? Dean stroked the barrel of the gun in his hand. Checked again: safety on—

—and the phone rang, a shrill clang. He fumbled for the receiver, breathed out, “Dad.”

“Dean.” John Winchester’s words came through slurred and tinny. Dean could hear someone honking a car horn nearby. “Where the hell are you?”

“Galesburg, near I-74. We’re in a motel. Look, I know I screwed up big-time—”

“Last I knew the reporter on TV was saying you were in custody,” his father snapped briskly, “but now they’re saying you engineered some miraculous escape. I don’t really need to know your crazy ass methods, but it doesn’t sound right. The electricity cut and the security clearances fritzed—”

“Dad—”

“—and the agents all knocked out as easy as pie. Dean, I know you’re not a bad hunter but being a hunter is worthless when you’re locked up—”

“Dad!” Dean stared down at his free hand, balled up into a fist so tightly that his knuckles stood out under his skin. “I don’t know what happened. I swear to God.”

“Dean, you’re on the _other side of the state_ from Kankakee. You don’t remember anything?”

“Damn it, Dad, I don’t know what’s going on! I just got sprung somehow, someone drove me away, and the FBI’s out there.”

Dean couldn’t even begin to guess what his father was thinking. But John Winchester never wasted his time—a fleeting pause, and then, “You tell me about that later. I want you out of there now as fast as possible.”

“... Yessir,” Dean squeezed his eyes shut, opened them and stared at chartreuse on the walls, blocks of aged mustard in thin violet pincers. “Anyway, got a four-wheeler.”

A harsh puff of breath echoing out of the receiver. “More interference? What kind? Or the guy who got you away?”

“That one, kinda. Not exactly. Usually the kind I’d take out for a spin, but, uh—” He winced. It was harder to talk about someone sitting right across the room from you when you phrased it like she was a damn car. This really wasn’t Dean’s idea of a hook-up.

“I get it. Keep your mouth zipped around her, get rid of her if you can. We don’t need anyone poking into our business more than they ought to.”

“Yeah, you mean not at all,” Dean said. Too late for that now. “I got that.”

“Bad enough the FBI’s caught wind of us,” John muttered. “Might have to go under for a while, dammit.”

“About that. They’ve gotta be tracking my phone, Dad, they took it from me. I got out of there with the shirt on my back and not much else.”

“Caleb can always resupply us. But there’s only one of you. Ain’t the same thing as a brainwashed shifter, son.”

He liked to think he was definitely a better shot than a shifter. And a much better charmer. “They’ve got the Impala too,” Dean said dully. “I—there wasn’t any time.”

John grunted. “... they’re not going to destroy it. It’s evidence.” _The car I bought for your mother_ , Dean could practically imagine the words scorching marks into his mind. _You lost it? You lost that, Dean?_

_I’m just that awesome. Shit, I really did._

“I got the truck, don’t worry about the Impala. Your phone—how many contacts you got?”

The last time he’d saved a new number had been back in that bar in Tennessee—”Had ‘bout a hundred,” Dean said. “But you know it’s just what you have. You, Bobby, Caleb, Pastor Jim.”

The list ended there. There were the one-night stands, the people from cases past, that old man playing chess every day at a cafe who’d taught him some extra-fancy lock picking, though Dean had long since forgotten his name. His father didn’t bother much to go out of his way to run into most other hunters, and Dean had followed his lead. If the FBI went down the list and checked every single one of them, his contacts would say either that he was a fantastic lay or that he was a fantastic lifesaver, whichever messed with the agents’ minds the most. Cassie might say he was a bastard. Others might say they didn’t remember him at all. And the last one—

Dean waited. His father said, “That sounds about right.”

“Dad,” he said sharply. “No, it ain’t yet.” John Winchester knew it as well as Dean did.

Over the line Dean heard his father swear in exasperation. “That girl’s still there listening to this, isn’t she? Fuck. Dean, I can call the others and tell them the FBI comes knocking, they’re all old hands and they can lie their hides right off, but there’s no way Sam could do that knowing in advance. He wouldn’t look surprised enough.”

“Sam’s not a crappy liar.”

“But he’s not good enough to pull off ignorance like this. I think I’d know my own son.”

 _But he’s my brother_. The words stuck in Dean’s throat, a tangle of prickly thorns. _I think I’d know him too. And you never knew about Stanford till it was too late. Fuck all, ‘cause I didn’t either._

_He was a pretty good liar, then._

“You want the FBI to tattletale on us?” Dean asked. “Not even get the news straight from us. He’s gonna be pissed.”

“Sam wanted to get out of hunting,” John said, his voice inexorable. “He wants out, then we keep him out.”

“... yessir.”

“I closed the case up here. At Chippewa right now. You remember that rundown place a few miles out from Sioux Falls, end of June? In Iowa.”

“Where we ganked the shifter?”

“That one. I’ll meet you there—get out of Illinois. I’m going now. Call me when you get there.”

“Yeah, I’ll—” Dean heard the click on the other end. “... see you then,” he finished.

He set the phone back down; ran his hands through his hair.

“You’re leaving now.”

Dean jerked his head up and gave the girl a careful look-over. She had the uncanny ability to turn her statements into questions, her eyes a pair of faded blue discs that reflected nothing back. But he pushed his uneasiness aside; said with a grin, “Yeah, I’ll get outta your hair now. Thanks for the lift,” and dialed up the charm—after all, why not make nice with the girl helping him out? See what else the psychic might know. At least there was one thing he was good at.

“I guess you know I’m Dean Winchester,” he said. “I save people, hunt things. So what’s your name?”

*

“Hey, my man Victor. Need more meds?”

“Keep your ibuprofen to yourself, Reidy,” Victor grumbled. “I don’t need another stash in my desk. What I _need_ is a goddamn explanation for...” He scrambled to pick up his line of thought. Glared at the computer screen as if he could gut its innards and string them out, pixel by bloody pixel, like Chinatown poultry ripe for the picking.

Calvin Reidy stuck his head in around the door. “I meant a chill pill, but ibuprofen for your headache works too. You realize you’re not going to be able to get the answer out of the tape by staring holes into it, yeah? You’ve burned enough midnight oil tonight.” Reidy—always Reidy, “never Calvin, god, do I _look_ like I’m eighty?”—stepped up behind Victor, clicking his heels on the linoleum floor, and braced his elbows on top of Victor’s chair.

“You mean early morning. Thanks. I got that already.” Victor rewound the security tape from the end, setting it on the slowest mode. A blur of total static resolved itself into a uniform darkness, before the electric lights began to revive like blinking fireflies on the screen. The Dean Winchester in the video stood up from his seat at the table and started walking backward with knees swinging out. At such a crawling pace, his bowlegs were particularly pronounced.

In the recording, Victor uncrossed his arms and sat back in his chair. He remembered leaning forward to press Winchester about the nastiness, that one bruise that looked like he’d kicked Natalie Wright in the stomach again and again. The action of a bully writ large—what a piece of work he was. _What a piece of work is a man_ , he had read in school so long ago, and so were they all, no angels but demons, the people he had run to ground as a hunting dog would tree its prey.

And yet somehow Winchester had managed to walk out the front door and leave him and Reidy and the others like a pile of knocked out fools. Reidy claimed he could remember a girl walking up to him before everything went black. Victor was sorely tempted to remind Reidy that they were in the FBI and were not supposed to be using hallucinogens.

 _Click_. Stop. Reidy reached past him, his hand resting lightly on the controls.

“ _Agent_ Henriksen,” he said crisply. ”As you well know, we need to check security and confirm the others detained here first. Figuring out how Winchester got the hell out of this place isn’t half as important making sure that others _don’t_ get the hell out of this place too. You gonna walk the perimeter with me or not? I promise I’ll wrack my brains later with you, cross my heart and hope to die.”

Victor tilted his head back and looked up. “Well, I need to get out of my chair first, so get off it,” he said.

“I’m not that heavy.”

“Your _elbows_ , man.” Victor straightened up; said, “I really piss you off, don’t I?”

“All the time,” Reidy said without any hesitation. But he grinned and slung his arm over Victor’s shoulder. “That’s why you’re awesome, partner of mine. It’s only when I’m most pissed that we think best. Now let’s go talk to the personnel. They’ve got some interesting stories to tell.”

This was what made Reidy a good partner—he was damn good at breaking Victor out of his tunnel vision. The reports he’d requested were in the fax machine by the time he’d gotten back to the desk, and he hadn’t even thought about them too much.

“What’s this?” Reidy was looking through one group Victor had set aside to staple. “Credit card fraud...”

“Credit card fraud. The Winchesters do it all the time.” Victor tucked a yellow highlighter behind his right ear and shuffled some more to the side. “The credit companies are goddamn stupid, just look at some of these names. _Luke Sky, Anakin Walker_. _William Picard_ and _George Worf_... You’d think they would know that at least some of these are flat out fakes.”

Reidy snorted. “It’s the number of customers, Victor. More customers for them, so you can’t fault them for it. Sucks for them when it backfires.”

“Right. So credit card fraud here. Here’s a list of unsolved cases dating back several years. What history we could dig up on the Winchesters, here—” Victor tossed another folder at Reidy, who snatched it out of the air.

“It’s pretty spotty,” Reidy said, flipping it open. “Anything else beside old man Winchester’s wife dying in the house fire and them going totally off the grid?”

“Check it out.” Victor didn’t raise his head. “I’m trying to see a pattern in their MO right now. Got more of their history since the last time we spoke.”

Mary Winchester, dead in a house fire, and a grief stricken man who dragged his two boys around the country like a set of rag dolls ready for kindling. Known interaction with a weapons supplier at one point. It would be damn near impossible for them to track their movements, but the boys’ school records were a boon, fractured as they were. A half year stint at one school, two months at another—jumping around without rhyme or reason, from Nebraska to Indiana to Minnesota. At one point they lived in Maine, where John Winchester had done a month of crab fishing. The younger son had done academic decathlon. The older son had gotten five detentions in two months.

“Interesting...” Reidy drawled the word out, like laffy taffy pulled flat. “Younger Winchester checks out squeaky clean. Sam Winchester, starting his senior year at—guess where?”

“Let’s not play games, Reidy. Harvard or whatever small-ville community college, you take your pick.”

“Senior at Stanford, of all places,” Reidy commented. “Full ride, Jesus Christ, what’d he do to get that? Hmmm, let’s see... he’s doing a double major in political science and classics with a Latin track. He’s just about as clean as a whistle as one could be—when you’re trying to get away from a fishy family history and make a name and place for yourself in the world. He’s gunning to become a lawyer.”

“What kind of law?”

“... criminal, huh. Funny, that.”

Victor looked up at that. Prosecution or defense? he thought—not an easy thing to guess, but if they could gain access to his class transcripts those might provide some insight. “So the Winchesters can either head to him for help, or avoid him altogether if he bucked them first,” he commented. “Wonder why Wonder Boy here decided to go straight.”

“Because he has a conscience? Because he has brains? Maybe he ate brains? Who knows?” Reidy shrugged.

“Don’t even start with that, damn it,” Victor said. “We already have to deal with people, don’t give me monsters to think about too. We’re not starring in a zombie movie any time soon.”

“Whatever you think, man. Maybe it’s easier to have monsters, ‘cause you can blame it on them instead of people. The people we see in our line of work—they practically _are_ monsters, except they’re people like us.”

“You depress me.”

“I inspire you all the time,” Reidy said grandly.

“Your ego _always_ does.” Victor paused. “Calvin.”

“Next time you call me that, I’m filling your drawers with tuna sandwiches. Or do you _want_ that smell hanging around your desk?”

His FBI partner was terrible at planning vengeance proper. Victor raised his eyebrows. “I don’t mind bulking up a bit.”

Reidy scowled; abruptly jumped back on track and said, “We should put up a stake out at Stanford then, what do you say? And then we can see which way the Winchesters might be headed, though to be honest I don’t think it likely they’re going to Mr. Sam Winchester here. Makes more sense to me that either they broke off and won’t go to him, or that they would avoid the place to throw off our suspicions in the first place. Turn Sam Winchester into a red herring while they go underground completely. Considering that we haven’t caught on to them all these years, they’re damn good at covering their tracks. They’ve even got friends, how the hell do serial criminals have those?”

Reidy was a straightforward person, but Victor was sure the Winchesters were a bit more counter-intuitive. “I’m not so sure they wouldn’t take a gamble on it. We could take a little trip to California, enjoy the weather ourselves. I’d like to talk to Sam Winchester in person.”

Reidy looked delighted. “You bastard, you just want the sunshine. And dibs on the stake out—”

Victor rolled his eyes. “Your nostalgia is utter shit, and so is your memory. No matter what we’re working on, we’re bound to be stuck with paperwork if you haven’t forgotten. I’ll have you filling out more forms than you can shoot.”

“Paperwork can go screw itself. We need a proper regular bonfire sometime, what do you say to that?”

“If you let me be the one who holds the match—”

“Nah, you can gather the wood. It’s my idea, I’m gonna be the one to do it. And where the hell is your imagination? Matches are small fry. You need a flaming torch that’s ready to take care of it all.”

“Right, right, as you like it. I’m not arguing, I just want to see the sights of this.” Victor tilted his chair back on its hind legs, balanced like a see saw. “Will you look at this? Here’s the local missing girl reports for girl number four. Also, we’ll need someone to take down all the data from Winchester’s phone, sort through his belongings to see if there’s anything we can tag to a specific location, person, whatever.”

“We can call in Doyle for that.”

“I thought she was assigned to—”

“Nah, Bodie broke that one. Doyle’s completely free now.”

“Great, then give it to her. She’s got an eye for the detail that gets someone caught.”

“Done and done, I’ll take care of that with the old bums.”

“Great. Just need to scour the local areas for any suspicious news...”

Reidy snagged the missing persons reports and started flipping through them. Victor turned his attention back to the information compiled on the Winchesters. They didn’t run in the normal networks of popular sovereignty, not the kind of people who eluded taxes and claimed the illegitimacy of government; their movements were erratic even for _that_ group, and they weren’t loud enough about any sort of imagined right. Persistently unpredictable in their locations and their crimes—Victor sketched the timeline in his notepad. Grave desecration in Idaho, residential arson at Cape Cod, reported presence in Galveston during a string of murders—wasn’t that a coincidence, he thought darkly, and drew a thick dark line underneath his entries. That case was still cold as a dead fish.

“Girl number four, huh... this one fits the description right. She disappeared from Kankakee State Hospital yesterday, before we caught Winchester. Blonde, kind of malnourished. She’d been in a coma for a month—they found her going barefoot on the street, mumbling nonsense to herself, though they couldn’t pinpoint what was actually wrong with her. Only woke up a week ago and injured a nurse when they tried to give her the prescribed meds. That’s when they moved her to Kankakee. Psychiatric, you know.” Reid frowned, gestured to her picture. “She looks kinda familiar. Got the thousand yard stare.”

Victor bit down on the urge to say to Reidy, _All girls look the same to you_. It was to his credit that he refrained from the jab.

“She looks about right. I only saw her in the dark before she ran off. What’s her name?”

“Never gave one while she was conscious. She wouldn’t answer them. They just called her Jane Doe and reported her escape to the local station. She couldn’t have gotten far on foot, though.”

“Yeah.” Victor chewed on the tip of his pen. It hadn’t rained yet, and traffic wasn’t that heavy around the place where Winchester had first been caught—

“We need to call the hospital,” he said. “If they have some clothing of hers that she used during her stay at Kankakee—”

“You can take care of that,” Reidy interrupted. “I’ll take care of the dogs.”

Victor laughed. “Reidy, you read my mind.”

*

“I was dreaming the other day, Sam.” Jess’s voice caressed the curve of his neck up to his earlobes, slid down to vibrate against his eardrum. Sam tensed. Two days ago, that bastard Walt had set off the dynamite underneath them both; it had taken forever to wash the blood out and banish the sharp stench of piss, the last gift of Walt’s oh so human fear. Since then he’d half expected the last sad wall of defense to crumble between him and the outside world—for the black smoke, the stifling silence, the uproar of oblivion to waft in gently, almost regretfully, as if it had arrived home at long last.

“You aren’t going to ask about my dream?” she said wistfully. Whispered, _It’s inevitable, don’t you know it? My dreams are yours. We’ll purge this world of its imperfections and start all over again—_

Sam didn’t much bother to distinguish his hallucinations from the visions of reality anymore. He didn’t answer, and never looked back. Behind him lay the discarded husks of empty houses that shone like hollow cicada shells, and scattered themselves among leaves of grass bleached brittle and dry like slivers of bone. The dust that had married itself to his tongue and his throat was truly the devil of them all, for nothing he ate went down and sat right in his belly, not even his own lukewarm spit and mucus. He had not seen water since he left the last town, where the faucets had streamed with blood like a river. Above his head the rising sun was the color of tarnished steel.

He heard the rumbling on the road before he saw its source, a truck with fender smashed and windshield cracked. The driver brought it to a screeching halt, still some distance, and came out with a rifle cocked and ready. “Winchester, you fucker!”

The words shattered the air, slithered into Sam’s ears like chittering bugs. Sam shied suddenly, turned, and tried hard not to cough up the blood that was ready to crawl out of his mouth. “Don’t,” he called, the strain of the forced volume showing in his voice. “Don’t follow—”

“Fuck you, what’d you do? And all those other places before, you think people just drop dead like that and turn into zombies? You’re carrying the croat virus with you, damn you. You’re a goddamn danger to everybody and everything, and you just keep _moving_. Look at your footsteps, damn it!”

“Shut up,” he screamed. “It’s not _me_!” It’s the voice in my head, he moaned silently to himself. It won’t let me die, it won’t... Sam had a stab wound in the chest, traces of arsenic flowing in his veins, a gunshot to the head, but they existed only in his memory.

He could not trust his memory any more. His skin and muscle and bone had knitted themselves back together so flawlessly till he resembled nothing more than the untouched state of a newborn, with his blood purged of all impurities of the world but one. He reeked of the sulfur—no, he was the sulfur. He was the shadow in the valley of the shadow of death.

 _Don’t shoot_ , he thought. _If you do_ —

The soles of Sam’s shoes sketched out tracks all the way from the last town, each a perfect red imprint in the dry ground. It was his personal seal—the completion of his every step, the expiration of a person’s breath in the trail he left behind.

The crack of the gunshot whipped through the air like the snap of a tree branch. Sam twisted his wrist sideways, and the crack that followed was steady and soft and inexorable. 

Jessica giggled.

When next he finally looked up, his eyes stinging in the light and bathed in the acidic sharpness of the wind, the nameless hunter had shambled to a stop, his posture loosening, till he slumped to his knees and embraced the grounded shadow with open arms. The shade settled underneath him and moved no longer. There he lay prostrate with his lips pressed to the dirt in a silent prayer, bent forth toward Sam across the road. Behind him the rickety truck stood sentinel to the dead trees and to the ground baked hard the color of charred vermilion, to Sam alone.

He could not cry. He walked to the poor dead thing and crouched down with the wind stirring up dust round the man’s body. He said, softly, “Guess you do look like a croat.”

He said, “You shouldn’t have come after me.”

 _That’s number nineteen_ , said Jess. _What a clean break of his neck you made. So neat. So talented._

“Shut up,” he said. “Shut up. Leave me alone. I want to dream for myself. My dream. Not yours. Not yours—”

 _Sam, Sam, Sam._ That odd arpeggio that Jess would hum, and that Lucifer sang even better. _You’ve always been here for me, Sam—_

 

“—Sam. Sam. _Sam_ —ow!”

Sam groaned and pushed himself up to lean against the headboard of their bed, the pain dully dancing at the top of his head.

“Oh god,” he said. “Oh god, I’m so sorry, Jess, I didn’t mean to—”

“Unless you have eyes in the middle of your forehead, I doubt you meant to hit my front teeth,” Jess mumbled through her hands. She rubbed under her nose, massaging her gums. “Those sleeping pills—they’re working too well. You—you really should lay off them for now.”

“It’s okay,” Sam said automatically, though it was a lie. They had started to lock him into his dreams—he no longer woke up from bleak, uneasy nightmarish images, but went right on living them.

This wasn’t something he would let Jess worry about. She shouldn’t have to.

He grinned weakly at her and ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth, parched and mummified. “Omelet with milk sounds good,” he said. “My turn for dishes?”

“ _Hand washed_. I know you like to fiddle with the dishwasher but you suck at the controls.”

“Hey, I’m not _that_ bad.”

What had he been dreaming of? Right, Jess. The two of them in a bleak desert; Jess had been wearing a white lily in her hair. Maybe it was a sign he needed a vacation already from school, Death Valley or elsewhere. God, it’d only been a few weeks since school started and he was already feeling burned out...

He got a face full of shirt and sputtered into the fabric. “Slowpoke,” Jess said, poking him in the shoulder. “Hurry up or I’ll eat your omelet for seconds. Can’t be late to your work shift. I’m not gonna throw your pants at you either.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“Right. You don’t need to be sleep-deprived before law school, god knows you’re going to be worked to the bone then anyway.”

“Trust me, sleep deprivation isn’t a big deal.” Sam swung out of bed and stretched his arms. Jess eyed him. Her mouth smiled but her eyes did not. Winked at him, before she turned, threw over her shoulder a “hurry up, you,” and pivoted out into the hallway.

She looked good like that, Sam thought, the lingering loveliness in the curve of her mouth and the brightness of her eyes. She’d been in his dreams. It had been just the two of them, traveling together. No nightmare, certainly not.

It was a surprise, then, that when he went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror—Sam Winchester, twenty-two years old, Stanford student, his image the very epitome of ordinary, wearing an ordinary T-shirt and ordinary jeans and smiling an ordinary smile—the bile rose up in his throat so fast that he bit down on his tongue and gagged at the sensation, the press of clammy fingers on his throat.

“Shit!” He spat into the sink. But the iron taste of blood clung to the insides of his mouth like a soft smothering blanket, and would not let go.

*

He didn’t so much as bat an eyelash of surprise when his son finally came around the corner of the barn with the blonde girl following him like a fucking ghost, but that was all the better. He’d learned that in Vietnam—you could never give away your face to the enemy.

Not their enemy, John mentally revised. But not exactly their friend, either.

“Dad!” Dean tried hard to look as if he wasn’t running, but relief wrote itself blindly across his eyes.

“I’ll get my stuff,” said the girl flatly, and turned back before John had so much as said a word to her. Retreated like a soldier, her back straight and her gait disciplined, though she didn’t look old enough to be one.

“Well, isn’t that something.” John glanced at Dean. “We even got alone time too.” Real considerate of her, he thought, and narrowed his eyes.

“She found me in the woods. And she’s psychic—but she said she wouldn’t tell me anything till she saw you too. Hell, she wouldn’t even say her weird psychic mumbo-jumbo, she just didn’t say anything at all. Damn it”—and Dean, his eldest, his crutch, his right hand, had the cheery temerity to crack a grin and add, “You’d think I was a butt ugly monster, because I’ve never met a girl who didn’t like me before.”

“Don’t exaggerate, Dean,” John grumbled. “Where does she live? She’s not coming with us.”

Dean dropped his eyes to the ground. “Well—yeah. She’s not from around here. She was tracking us down because something’s gonna go wrong and we need to stop it, as if that’s anything new.”

Just their luck that a psychic would tag onto them like a goddamn bloodhound. “Well, she can tell us what she knows,” he said, “and then we’re dropping her off at the next bus station. We’re going to have to go deep, Dean—I talked to Jim and he says we can stay at his place for now. Swing by Caleb’s to grab some stuff and we can get out of here—”

“Then—” Dean stopped. “I told her but she said she’d come with us—”

“Where the hell are her parents? They’re okay with her giving them the slip? Jesus, Dean, just _think_. On top of a murder rap we get kidnapping charges and detectives tracking us down for taking a live human with us.” A live human, rather than a corpse bundled into the trunk. There was some novelty in the situation. Above Dean’s shoulder, John saw the girl approaching, and looked her in the eye; said, “No, she’s going home to her parents, and that’s that.”

“My family,” said the girl, “is very thoroughly dead to me.”

Dean twitched. “Fuck, be noisier so I can hear you,” he said to the girl, who had padded up silently behind him. “Jesus Christ, Cassie.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“She doesn’t need to be noisier—pay more attention next time,” John said shortly. And her name. Dean couldn’t still be hung up on that reporter girl a while back, was he? Of course he’d soften around any reminder of that. He was going to have to have words with his son about that...

“He was only listening to your opinion, Mr. Winchester,” she said.

He hadn’t been called that in a while. Usually it was “John,” or “sir,” or “you motherfucking bastard, get the fuck out of here.” Mr. Winchester—now that was something of the old days. ( _“Mr. Winchester,” says the old geezer Hancock from four houses down, “I am so sorry about that fire and your wife—”_ )

Mr. Winchester. That might have been deliberate on her part. “What happened to your parents?” John looked down at the crown of her head, the sweep of hair that partially obscured her left eye.

“They’re dead,” she said, her lips twisting down in a grimace more bitter than sorrowful. “And so they’re gone. It’s none of your concern. We should go, Mr. Winchester—the police will be coming soon. I can hear the hounds.”

“Call me John,” John said. With psychics you had to pick and choose: no need to grill her on family deaths right away, and the talk of hounds was just total gibberish. “But look, what makes you think you’re coming with us? Or that we’d agree to it? We don’t need civilians riding along with us, and we don’t need extra baggage. We’ll drop you off somewhere.”

She shoved her hands into her jean pockets as the early morning wind went whistling across the Impala—through her hair—down into John’s lungs, and he breathed in again like it was salvation. Clean and new and not tainted yet by the smell of smoke.

“You’ve met psychics before,” she said, and did not ask.

John grunted. “We run into them, in our line of work.”

“So you know what we’re like. Most of us need physical proximity to our targets. So.” She looked away from him, and spoke to Dean instead, her words fletched like arrows for the bullseye. “Your brother Sam. There’s something going on at Stanford, and that thing you’ve both hunted for ages—it’ll be there. I can’t see specifics because I’m on the other end of the country, but you take me with you to California and I can help you track that demon down.”

He’d breathed in too much air. It’d gone to his head. “Demon?” John said hoarsely. “How would you—what’d you see—” If her parents were like Mary—if that meant she was like Sam—

“Sam!” The freckles stood out on Dean’s face, a smattering of skin-dirt dark on pale. “What the _fuck_ do you know about him?”

She raised her chin higher—an absurd gesture, a sorry attempt at intimidation, John thought. Five foot three inches at most, and still trying to stare them down, mirroring their stances and the hostility of their eyes. She pulled it off better than he would have imagined from a girl of her stature. “There’s no need for you to ask,” she said.

“Dad—”

“That’s pathetic,” John cut in. Jerked his head sideways to glance at Dean, gave him the signal for silence—his son backed down then, mouth clamped shut and his eyes making up for all that he wasn’t saying. “You have to give us more than that to even start convincing us.”

“About the demon?” She held out her hands, palms up. “It’s interested in your son—and not for good reasons. It needs to be destroyed.”

“What’s your horse in this race?” John mused. He made a motion as if to clasp his hands behind his back, but instead stroked the holder of his revolver. “It got your parents too?”

“Nothing to do with them.” The line of her mouth sharpened and then crumpled as she spoke again. “But you’ve known the purity of evil, haven’t you? I’ve seen it enough. This vision—it follows me. Always. And I know the demon will realize sooner or later. It’ll come after me too. I’m sure you can understand the self-interest inherent in self-preservation.”

This was easier ground to work on. John had never been comfortable around anyone who professed unlimited generosity; people who did were usually liars.

Or, he thought as he eyed her, maybe the psychic was just playing on his suspicions. Judging the strength of a psychic’s powers was never easy: there were psychics like Bryan Martell, who could say what kind of clothing you’d worn the day before and nothing more, and then there were psychics like Missouri Moseley, who had a second sight so uncanny that John wasn’t ever going back to Lawrence unless his family’s lives were staked on it. “What are you proposing? We go to Palo Alto like lambs to slaughter?”

“No,” she said. “We’re going elsewhere first. Manning, Colorado. So _we_ can do the slaughtering.”

A threat coming from a little girl like her—ridiculous as hell, but who was John to complain? Who the ever loving fuck this was, she’d sure done her research. “ _Daniel_ Elkins? What do you want with him?”

“Elkins?” John heard Dean break in, raising his voice, snapping the buckle of his belt in irritation. “Who’s he?”

“Hunter. Retired. Specialized in vampires.”

“Vampires? Wait, I didn’t think they—”

John snapped, “It doesn’t matter, Dean! They’re extinct. That’s not relevant.” Dean didn’t need to know anymore, he thought, and frowned at the girl. “Why do we need him? He’s not gonna be helpful with the demon.”

“We don’t need _him_. We need his gun.”

John stared. “His—”

It sank into his mind slowly, that silent realization. How many times had he mentioned it to Elkins? The countless moments when he had spoken of how to destroy the monster that had taken his wife—regardless of what it had been, a vampire, a shifter, a demon, a ghoul? Who had the power to string Mary up to the ceiling like a cluster of Christmas lights? Even back then, and him so young, there had been a touch of the Vietnam killer left over in him from the war—the Charlie was your enemy, so the Charlie was the one you shot. These things that were your enemies: they too were the ones you set out to destroy.

He’d always believed exorcism was just a total cop out.

He had sworn to kill Mary’s killer. You could exorcise a demon, but he’d yet to hear how to kill one. There’s a myth, he’d said to Elkins once. John had been cleaning out his revolver, drying it off carefully, inspecting the barrels, while Elkins sat back in his chair, a languid sprawl of limbs, and poured bourbon for them both, a shot of the old strong stuff. An old Colt that could kill anything. Made by Samuel Colt way back in the 1800s, with special bullets and all. Something that could kill anything, do you think—

That’s a real yarn right there, Winchester, Elkins had said, and rolled his eyes. His arm shook when he raised his glass—Elkins was getting old, young John Winchester had thought to himself, no wonder he’s retiring, but now the truth lodged in his throat like a stone, _He was lying, he was and he knew it_ —and Elkins had said, You put your faith in pipe dreams and you’ll never get anywhere in life. Or death. Dead end, boy, sure and simple. Can’t rely on stupid objects like that. There’s nothing that will save you so easily as if you save yourself.

The John of that time had stopped listening, though. If the Colt was nonexistent then whatever else Elkins had said to him did not particularly matter.

“His— _gun_ ,” said John. “You mean to be telling me that he lied to me _all this time_?”

“I don’t know what he told you,” the girl Dean had called Cassie said, and shrugged, “and I don’t care. We need the Colt to kill the demon.”

“The Colt?”

John ignored Dean’s question, jerked his head toward the truck and said, “Get in. We’re getting out of here. You tell me about this on the way.”

“I’m glad that you’re not too unreasonable,” the girl said very coldly.

“Dad. Dad!” Dean hissed at him. “I need a fucking explanation, Elkins and the Colt thing and—you didn’t say anything about who or what this is before—”

John whirled around. “Damn it all, Dean, I’ll tell you on the road! We’re leaving before the police pick up on our trail. Go!”

Dean bit his lip; said, “Yes, sir,” in a lower voice than usual, his eyes fixed on the ground and his shoulders a tense line, and trotted off.

John turned back to the girl. “So. Cassie, right?” he said. Behind them, Dean slung his bag into the truck bed and cursed at the mud. “Your name’s Cassie.”

“ _No_ ,” she said so vehemently that John cut her a glance and a frown. “That’s not my name. No one calls me that.”

“Right then,” said John, opening the door. “So?”

She slid into the backseat and slipped off her sneakers, tucking knees under chin.

“That’s your cue. You’re supposed to say your name.” The seat sighed heavily under John’s weight.

The girl had oriented her head to look toward the steering wheel, but the weight of her gaze passed straight through and on toward some undefinable, intangible dimension, as of one inhabited by the invisible shadows of the soul. “... I was named Castiel,” she said, as Dean climbed into the front.

“Kind of a weird name, Cassie,” Dean commented, and grinned weakly. “Cas—tee—el. You sure you don’t want—”

Her voice flattened to a monotone. “No. Call me Cas. Nothing else.”


	2. and singing bones

_“You fucker, you didn’t say a single thing!”_

_“Sorry for the wait,” Castiel says, but doesn’t pretend to be any more apologetic than she tries to sound. You’d think the dead croats had hardened Dean enough against the pain of absence, she thinks, the croats and the people who have died under his watch. They’ve lost enough people over the years._

_(She cannot remember the last time they saw Sam.)_

_The Fearless Leader of Camp Chitauqua drops his arms, the act of an embrace aborted, and sits down heavily on his bed. The springs under the mattress squeak in pain, rust and age eating away at the metal. “Could’ve given me a heads up earlier, you know,” he mutters. “When you told me to leave you to die.”_

_“I never said that. I said the body would not survive.” Cas twirls a strand of hair around her finger, but it slips out of her grip. She keeps to the door; wonders if she should approach him and sit, or rest a hand on his shoulder. But Dean always speaks of personal space, and it would be stranger still with Castiel now in a new vessel. She is no longer sure of the protocol of behavior; she has never worn a young girl before. “I didn’t realize it would take so long, or if I could make it in the first place. She agreed—she was alone, and she just wanted to bury her father first. And... I am slower to travel, these days.”_

_Dean lifts his head again to look at her—a smear of ash tracks across his forehead, blending in with the sweat and oils of his skin._

_If only it were truly Ash Wednesday._

_“It’s already been three days,” he says, his eyes shuttered and red. He’s been drinking again. “What am I gonna tell everyone? ‘Hey, this is actually Cas—yeah, you know, the guy who just died, and I let it happen. He looks like a girl now, but remember Cas can still take you down in a fight?’ Why didn’t you say_ anything _to me?”_

_Castiel levels her gaze at his face till Dean glanced away, uncomfortable under her newly alien scrutiny. “Just in case I failed,” she murmurs. “I didn’t want you to hope, and to destroy your hope.”_

_“Cas, you’re a total bastard, you know that?” Dean laughs, a short bark that strangles and dies in his throat, and the derision in the sound strikes Castiel harder than any blow._

_“I try to please.”_

*

~~Faint clattering from the hallway, barely audible, but Sam blinked awake and his brain kicked into gear. Next to him, Jess still breathed on in slumber, so he sat up as quietly as he could. No need to wake her, and no need to let the intruder know he’d heard~~

~~His phone started vibrating in the middle of lecture, but the professor was a sworn enemy of cell phones and would’ve swooped down like a vulture eager for confiscation. Half an hour later, Sam slung his bag onto his shoulder and flipped open his phone in the hallway, and stared at the screen. A missed call from—he pressed the button, held the phone to his ear so tightly that his earlobes were mashed against his head. “Why you calling now?” he muttered, but the only answer that greeted him was voicemail: “Hey. This is Dean. Call me later.”~~

~~Jess opened the door. “Brady!” she exclaimed, and he grinned sheepishly at~~

 

i need a DRINK DAMN IT. and some goddamn aspirin. WHERE IS MY FUCKING BEGINNING FUCKITY FUCK I CAN’T SLEEP

WHAT IS THIS SHIT

MY HEADACHE

FUCK

[Microsoft Word, restore from saved draft 22 October 2005, Chuck Shurley]

*

“Fifteen minutes. _Fifteen_. I was going to fossilize right here.”

Jess shrugged; snapped the elastic band of her lab goggles with a twang before she settled them on her forehead, twin plastic discs blindly staring upward. Early morning lab work was rarely rejuvenating, and today was no exception, not even with Sam’s teethy wake-up call. This was the first day their waking order had been reversed; she hoped he’d made it to work in time. “Says you. I’ll bet you got here five minutes ago. You still smell like the fertilizer they’re pushing up outside.”

And felt a bit sorry as the words left her mouth. Her old labmate was doing her the favor, after all. But Brady was—had become—the kind of guy who could get a rise of sarcasm out of anyone, sleep-deprived Jess in that category.

Brady resembled a dog when he bristled, she thought. A little show of teeth, more rigidity in his neck and shoulders. And yet uncanny timing. Coffee when she needed it, from the resident coffee dealer. The luxury of money, he had it in spades, and a sleeping schedule which guaranteed he was awake whenever anyone called.

“Fucker. Who else is going to give you your morning drug?”

… she really didn’t get Brady, sometimes. “Hello? Boyfriend?” Jess wagged a finger at him.

“Yeah, but Sam would come with that goddamn swill from Starbucks. I’m beginning to have second thoughts about—”

Jess snagged the bag of ground coffee beans. “Thanks, Brady Bunch,” she chirped, barreling past Brady’s half-hearted scowl. She teased the top open and sniffed—the smell went straight to her brain, the caffeine jolt and the sharp bitter twist. It certainly made up for the smell of rotting eggs which had been coming from the dumpster next to their apartment for the past week or so. Must’ve been a really disgusting cooking experiment. Jess suspected it was Sam’s work. “Why are you up so early?”

“Distracting you with my sheer brilliance to sabotage your experiments. You’ll think so much about getting your caffeine and hanging out with me you’ll forget to check on your cultures.”

“You’re a terrible spy. You should’ve stayed on so for closer proximity.”

Brady waggled his eyebrows. “I have better ways, Miss Pipette.”

“I’ll pipette _you_ out of this lab if you call me that again.” Jess tapped the door handle, wondered if she should ask again. It was seven in the morning, after all. _Why are you up so early?_ But Brady never answered any question head-on.

“Yes, ma’am. Whatcha working on?”

“You have nothing better to do than pester me?” Jess pressed the back of her hand to her forehead and rolled her eyes dramatically, but slid Brady a smile. For all the ways he grated on her, she couldn’t forget the boy who’d opened a door and smacked it right into her face on her first day at Stanford, before offering to carry all her luggage.

"I like to stalk you, my dear Jess," Brady said in a singsong voice.

"You are _such_ a creeper," she told him.

"Never denied it." Brady tilted his chin down, a shadow over his face—so dark, she couldn't even see the light pupils of his eyes. A chill shivered its way up her spine; the lab's awfully cold, she thought to herself. Smells a little too.

"Whatever," she said hastily. "Got to get to work now. You want to grab lunch with Ming and Rebecca and the others later?"

"I'll always be there." Brady made her a mock salute before he turned on his heel. "I'll see you then!"

*

Dean slid down in his seat as the truck whizzed innocently by a police cruiser on the side of the highway. “Hey,” he said dispiritedly. “Cas. Maybe we should... switch seats or something. Since they can see me better up here.” A terrible day, the day when he was giving up shotgun. Sometimes he couldn’t believe himself. But they’d been traveling yesterday and all today so far, taking the small roads and taking a lot more time than necessary to get to Manning, Colorado. They wouldn’t be so road shy if it weren’t for the proliferation of cop cars all along the freeways.

“They’re only watching out for speeding,” Cas said. She had slipped her shoes off again, shedding dirt on the floor and digging her toes like claws into the side of her seat. How the hell had she gotten her feet dirty? Good thing this was the truck, Dean thought, because he would’ve ripped into her if it were the Impala. “But if you prefer—”

“Good idea, Dean.” His dad twisted the steering wheel to the side as they rounded the next curve. “We can take a quick exit in a few miles—you two switch there. Cas, I need you to grab some food from the convenience store. Dean, call Bobby and ask him about the cops for us, will you? He’s less likely to chew your head off than mine.” He dug his hand into his pocket, driving one-handed; tossed his cell phone.

Dean caught it easily. “Got it,” he said. _I know what you mean._

The gas station and convenience store was a small affair; Cas took the wad of cash that Dad handed her and trotted off, kicking up dust as her shoes scuffed at the dirt. No more credit cards for them—they had to keep a clean trail.

His dad kept the truck idling in place, with a trucker cap blocking his upper face from the sight of others. Dean sprawled out over the back seat, his head propped up against the armrest, and waited for Bobby to pick up on the other end. And considering it was Dad’s cell phone he was using, more likely than not Bobby would start with a curse.

He wasn’t proven wrong. “What are you calling me for now?” Bobby sounded almost bored at first, but his voice sharpened suddenly. Must’ve caught sight of the caller ID; and it was probably a slow news day which kept his wall of phones quiet, so Bobby was free to concentrate all his energies on denigrating John Winchester. “Last time I saw you I would’ve been happy to give you a taste of buckshot, you ass.”

“Hey Bobby,” Dean said. “You definitely got out of the wrong side of bed this morning. Miss me too?”

“Dean!” Bobby’s voice changed, a bit warmer and slower. “Well, good to hear you got out of custody for now, though I’ll be damned if I put together an ID for you, if they trace it back to me. Idiot. What do you need?”

“What, I can’t call you up just to say hi?”

“No one calls me up just to say their damn hello good mornings, so cut the bullshit, Dean.”

Hunters always returned to the ultimate topic of conversation in the end: their hunts. Dean just happened to be on the hunted end. “I want you to look someone up. There’s a psychic who’s saying Sam’s in danger, so we’re going to Palo Alto.” It sounded like such a load of crap—of course this was the kind of thing that only a hunter would say, and yet mean it in all seriousness. “Her name’s Castiel. She hasn’t said much about her background other than that her parents are dead, she goes by Cas, and she looks like she’s... I’m not sure, fifteen, sixteen years old? But small for her age, she doesn’t eat a lot.” We don’t have much food, he thought. And she doesn’t even _complain_.

“Cas—tee—how does she spell it?”

“C, a, s. That’s Cas. Then t, i, e, l.”

“Gotcha,” Bobby said. “Huh. Weird name.” Dean heard him tapping away at his keyboard on the other end, in the silence of a house inhabited by a lone man. Dean didn’t know how often he had guests. “You going to Stanford? You should tell Sam. You know that the law’s probably got its eye on him too, because of you.”

“I know that. We gotta go anyway to make sure he’s okay.” No details for Bobby— _we’re going after Mom’s killer. We don’t need to drag him into this._ “Dad said we should let him alone, especially since he wanted out—”

“He wanted out, he’s out,” Dad said gruffly from the front seat, and clammed up.

“Dean. I’m not sorry to tell you this, ‘cause your father’s an idiot. Period. It’s the plain and simple truth. Sam’s your brother, and he ought to know.”

“Well.” Dean pinched the bridge of his nose. “Yeah.” Bobby might as well say it to John himself, but Dean was pretty certain his father wouldn’t budge on the issue.

“Yeah, if you actually follow my words then I’ll be damned honored.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You figure it out yourself, I ain’t telling you squat. Anyway. Castiel. All I can find here right away is that Castiel’s supposed to be the angel of Thursday. Angel’s slackin’ off on the job, because today’s Friday and my yesterday sure was shitty as hell. The sheriff came nosing around like usual, then I burned my dinner on the stove.”

“What was it?”

“What was—oh, shut up.”

“Yeah, sorry about your pot roast. I was in the truck with my dad trying to get away from the goddamn law.”

“Well, Dean, sucks to hear that, because it doesn’t sound fun to have that kind of company.”

Would be Bobby to say it like that—whether it was Dad or the police as bad company wouldn’t be something he would say outright. Dean snorted. “That’s it? Castiel’s an angel? That doesn’t help any since angels don’t even exist. Her family must have been super religious to pull out obscure names like that.”

“I got nothing to say about family naming conventions,” Bobby said. “She got a brother named Michael, what’s that matter to any of us? Her family’s not interfering with this, are they? She doesn’t have wings, she’s one hundred percent human, she eats and pisses and breathes like the rest of us all.”

“No,” Dean said impatiently. “I mean, her name’s not a big deal.”

“Then there you have it. You want me to dig up some more dirt on her, give me some time and I’ll get back to you later.”

“All right. Let me know what you got. What are the cops saying about me?”

“Eh. It’s not exactly pleasant stuff. Not much, but what they’re saying is a load of crock about how you and John do all sorts of petty crime, and that you’re prime suspect. And they know you’re going west.”

Dean didn’t say anything for a moment. Prime suspect, what a load of shit. Sure, they would talk all that language about innocent before proven guilty, but in the end they were aiming to get him for good. “Fuck,” he said finally. “We weren’t sure... We’ve been staying off the big roads, it’s been a damn pain trying to make good time with that. Cas has been getting all the food for us, we sleep in the truck at night—”

“Wait. Castiel’s traveling with you?”

“Guess I wasn’t clear—yeah, she is. She’s the one who hid me first before Dad came to get me.”

“... Shit. Cops know you’re traveling with her too. People know about that, it won’t fool the FBI for long. I saw the reports but I was thinking they got it wrong—didn’t think you two would be taking along a random civilian. Makes sense though, if she’s a psychic. They’re not all that bad. I can tell you what the cops know. Didn’t even have her name—she got out of a hospital, they called her Jane Doe. Tracked her scent and yours to a motel, and the dogs pointed their noses west like damn statues. So they know you’re headed that way. And no picture of her, just a description, so people won’t catch on so quickly.”

“Hospital?”

“I can try breaking into their records, or at least ask someone else who’s better at it than I am.”

“Nothing else we can do about it. Thanks, Bobby.”

“Take care of yourself, and tell your dad he’s a bastard.” There was little sting in Bobby’s words though. “And that he should take care too.”

“Yeah. We’ll call you later.” Dean flipped the phone closed.

*

I want beef jerky. And Snickers. And—

That’s enough, Claire. This is enough.

She blinks at the aisle of food in front of her. It never fails to blind her, the gaudy packaging and the sheer smell of availability, and the acid turns over in her stomach sickeningly. Claire is always hungry. Castiel is never hungry.

Say that again.

This is enough.

No. The—the one before.

That’s enough, Claire.

She puts the food down at the register, hands the money to the boy manning the register with a curt nod. The corners of her eyes begin to prickle with wetness—but though Castiel can’t inhabit the body as well as she used to, the power slowly wrung out of her by each passing day, Claire cannot cry.

Claire. You know I will always know your name.

You promised, after this was all over—

After this is all over. Then I will take you to your family, Claire. Claire, you understand, don’t you? she says to herself; takes the bag and walks out of the store, kicks at a rock on her way to the truck. John rolls down the window and grunts at her. “Get in, Cas.”

Cas lets her mouth curve downward, a polite smile. Looks at Dean in the back, Dean the Fearless Leader. Bobby will not know who I am. He won’t find Claire, because Claire is here with me.

And when we take care of Azazel, it won’t matter.

The universe presses down on her like soil over an unmarked grave, tucked away, forgotten.

*

He bit down on his tongue and felt the taint clicking against his gums. It reminded him distantly of the dream he’d had, the day before yesterday. “I—I don’t understand,” Sam said. “What’s wrong with my brother?” He ticked off the possibilities: there were only two. Caught for impersonation, or caught for hunts seen as crimes.

Either was better than the third, the impossibility that—

The FBI agent who had introduced himself as Agent Henriksen didn’t smile, although the lines of his face had smoothed into a softer mask, no longer a wall of official posturing—though it was a mask still. He just didn’t know that Sam could do one better than he could. “You hit the nail on the head, Mr. Winchester.”

He’s not dead. Sam turned the start of his relieved sigh into a grimace. He couldn’t afford his face to betray himself just yet. “He got caught up in gang turfwars or something? That’d be like him, he’s kind of... wild like that. Trouble just finds him. Look, I haven’t talked to my family in ages—we had a falling out—so—”

“Mr. Winchester—”

“Call me Sam, please. Want to come in?”

Henriksen inclined his head and quirked his mouth. _Must be pleased to be on more familiar terms_ , Sam thought. _Especially since I gave it to him_.

The FBI agent said, “I appreciate it, but no thanks. I’d like to ask you to come to the station with us. Your brother Dean’s been involved in an investigation of mine as a suspect, and we like to be as thorough as we can.”

“What happened?”

Henriksen’s face remained perfectly blank as he said, “I can give you more details in a bit, if you could come to the station with me? Procedure, as you understand.”

Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly. Sam blinked, twitched his mouth into a wan smile he didn’t feel at all. Nicely done, Dean. Dad. Fuck. “Sure, I’ll come with you,” he said. “Just let me get my keys and leave a note for my girlfriend.”

“We can do that,” Henriksen said, watching him very closely.

Sam turned away, his face rigid and composed. This was of course routine, he thought to himself, of course the authorities would want to talk to family of suspects. But he had to concentrate to keep his hand from shaking as he made chicken scratch on a scrap of paper— _something came up, be back soon, love you_ —and tucked it into the wrapping on the cookies he’d made. He and Jess had been planning a quiet movie night, but hopefully he’d be back before she came home for dinner and could forestall any questions.

He didn’t try to prod conversation into existence on the car ride over, short as it was. Let bewilderment write itself all over his face, quizzical eyes, a musing mouth. He knew squat, of course, and made sure Henriksen knew that too. _Don’t be intimidated. Be quick on your feet. They’re going to pin all their attention on you like you’re a butterfly in their collection, watch your face for your reaction._

 _Don’t give Dean away_.

If they were going to concentrate on him, he was going to give them the same and more. The black sheep of the family, more than willing to help, and giving as good as he got. God knew Henriksen was trying to make him feel at ease, too—driving a nondescript car, making small talk about California weather. “Sunny like hell here,” Henriksen commented. “Been to the beach here?”

“Few times,” Sam replied, squinting through the windshield as they drew up to the station. “Colder than Florida, though.”

“In that case, sorry in advance for the air conditioning.” Henriksen scrunched up his shoulders briefly as he opened the door. The indoor AC hit them both full-blast like the breath of a frost giant. “Guess you’d rather be enjoying the weather,” Henriksen added as he led Sam to a clean, bare room. Not even a window for distraction, just a table and chairs—if it weren’t for Henriksen’s relaxed demeanor, Sam would have thought he was going to be interrogated as a suspect himself.

“Nah, don’t worry about it. If you could tell me what’s going on...”

“Right.” Henriksen gestured for him to take a seat, and did likewise. “I’ve been investigating a cluster of murders in Illinois,” he began. “Three high-school-age girls in the same school district were killed one by one, all in different ways. Your brother happened to be near the scene, but he left town and has been missing ever since. I was hoping you could talk to us about him?"

 

He came out of the station with the one mantra running through his head: Be composed. Be composed. Be composed. It took an inordinate amount of effort for him to keep himself from clenching his hands into fists, keep his muscles from trembling—but he had had practice before, long ago on the hunts as a young boy trying to look like he knew what was happening, so the sensation was not as unfamiliar as it could have been. He strolled down the street, coming to a small cafe and ducking in to calm and organize his nerves.

He sat down in the seat with a relieved huff, tucked away in the corner far away from the window, just in case the agents would pass by and see him. Not that the sight of them would mean anything, except that he just needed to get away from someone who would bring the subject up again, Dean and Dad—on the run for some kidnappings and murders that they definitely had not done because no matter how long they had remained out of contact, Sam Winchester was no fool, and his family certainly was not either.

He ordered a small green tea, thought, maybe some flowers for Jessica, should I tell her the news about Dean and Dad—it was probably best to do so. Or maybe not. He’d wanted to keep Jessica out of this—not fair, really, that she should get dragged into it at all, Sam thought to himself.

He pulled out his phone and scrolled down. _Dean_ , said the display, and his fingers lingered over the call button before he took a deep breath and pressed down. The line rang, and rang again, and—

He waited. It went to voicemail: “Hey, this is Dean. Call me later.”

Sam hung up before the beep. There were others he could call. There was one other he could call. But Dad was unlikely to pick up, surely, especially after Sam’s departure from their temporary home of the time—it was unnerving that even Sam could not remember it properly. He remembered where the table had been, of course, where Dad had slammed down his glass so hard that it cracked and the surface had a small permanent dent in it; that there had been a little dream catcher hanging from the opposite wall because he had stared solidly at that the entire time while being harangued by his father; that the door had squeaky hinges because they shrieked like a banshee gone even madder when he slammed the door closed behind and stormed to the nearby bus station for the first bus on the route to Palo Alto. But he couldn’t remember—an apartment or house, or had it been a trailer? Whatever it was, the door had made a very conclusive impression of the whole matter.

He had seen Dean since then, once during his freshman year which had resulted in a huge fight and left his then roommate freaked out about living with Sam (no wonder, really, that he decided to move off campus), and he had seen his father not at all.

 _Dad_ , said the display.

He pressed the call button. The line rang once, and then a neutral, disinterested bland voice took over: “The number you are trying to reach has been disconnected. Please contact—”

He hung up. It made him feel better; he had tried, after all. His father was the one who had disconnected. Not him. _You walk out that door, don’t you ever come back._ And John Winchester was the kind of person who meant to keep his word.

He looked down at his tea, as if the tea leaves which had settled to the bottom of the cup like miniature clusters of anchors could somehow divine the true origin of this crisis and all that would come from it, a second sight that could open up his mind to realities beyond the one in which he lived. The tea was tinged red—drip drop drip went the blood into the cup, spurting forth like blossoms of crimson peonies on a grave.

It’d been dripping like that, he thought tiredly. All that red on the ground. As tears would—as if he were crying blood—

He blinked. _Fucking hell, I need more sleep._ Raised the mug, and drank the perfectly unbloody tea.

*

Victor turned the cell phone display around to show Reidy. “And there you go,” he said. “One missed call: Sam Winchester.”

“You were really expecting it, weren’t you?” Reidy perched on the chair, methodically peeling an apple. The blade of the knife flashed silver, lithe as a minnow, under the glaring bright lights of the police station. He had placed himself in just the right spot so that the peel dropped easily into a garbage can to the side.

“You weren’t there when I first told Winchester the news. His face changed, sure, but not quite enough. He definitely didn’t hear about the news from anyone else before I told him, but he wasn’t surprised enough. And he agreed to come to the station before I told him anything at all. No one does that, they always work up a storm about being informed and all. Not a peep from him. Like he could imagine them doing it.”

“Or that he knew they _could_ do it.”

“That’s not the same thing,” Victor said, “but you get my drift.” He massaged his eyebrows, feeling an incipient headache come on. It’d gotten worse in the last few years, and sometimes he had days where he could feel a migraine coming on, though it never quite hit him. The stress would boil up like a tea kettle, stored inside until he vented it—by running, by gun training, by tracking criminals down. About time he needed stress relief. “We’ll have to talk to him again, to get some more insight into them, if he’ll be talkative enough.”

“He lives with his girlfriend,” Reidy commented. “We should talk to her too, in case he’s talked to her some about his family.”

“Noted,” Victor mumbled. He propped his elbows on the table and stared at the far wall. It was speckled in patches where paint had flaked off, and someone had doodled in the corner a tiny little stick man being hanged—or was he hanging himself? Perhaps they were one and the same. The price of failure, Victor thought darkly. They wouldn’t be able to hide for long.

“Apple for your thoughts?” Reidy asked. Victor raised his head—Reidy flung a half-peeled apple slice at him. The sliver of red arced through the air like a pearl diver, heading for the bridge of his nose, between his eyes, till Victor leaned back as quick as lightning and caught it in his teeth instead. “Mmph,” he said around the apple piece. “Thanks.”

The apple burst into flavors on his tongue, strangely sweet and sour all at once. He crunched down on it, felt the peel catch between his canines. Honeycrisp apples, Reidy’s great indulgence. Victor was more than content with the side benefits.

He swallowed it, said: “We’ll have to monitor Sam Winchester and his movements too. He may be more sympathetic than we thought.”

“Yeah. He did cut off all communications with them before now, though...”

“And so? Family is family, and for most people that makes all the difference.”

*

_Dude_ , Dean thought to himself, _he could at least turn the lights on_.

They had gotten directions from a neighbor several miles back—“Yes, the old guy’s about most always in, he doesn’t leave unless it’s groceries or the museum changes its exhibit, something like that”—but the house was dark and lifeless when Dad pulled the truck up in the gravel-laden driveway.

“Guess it was grocery time,” Dean said, poking his head out the window.

“Not grocery time,” Cas said baldly. She narrowed her eyes. “He’s certainly in there. I think the neighborly grapevine sent him warning.”

“... Okay then.” Dean opened his hands palms up, empty and bare. “What’s he got in store for us, a damn ambush?”

“Elkins always _was_ the original suspicious bastard,” his dad said. “He taught me a lot about what I know of hunting these days.”

Dean eyed his dad. If John Winchester _wasn’t_ the original suspicious bastard, then...

“Let’s get the Colt,” Cas said, and hopped out.

The Colt, Dean thought, as they trudged upward to the bleak house in a line. He’d heard nothing of it, neither hide nor hair, and yet his father had known of its existence all this time, had not even bothered to impart this knowledge to him. Some gun supposed to kill anything with its bullets, like a magic wand. It didn’t sit quite right with him at all, this instrument of destruction based solely on belief and not proof—but surely if it was a total fluke and a dud then Elkins could have easily destroyed it instead of choosing to guard it.

To kill demons—because Cas had told them it was a demon who had killed Mary Winchester, “A yellow-eyed demon named Azazel, one of the higher-ups, you know, but I don’t know what he was doing in that room,” and she turned her face away from them, as if she were sorry for that distant death, two decades ago. Demons, demons, demons—he was so rusty on knowledge of demons that when John asked him he could not have even said how to exorcise one. The expression of disappointment on his father’s face had been almost unbearable.

He said to himself, again and again in his mind: _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus, omnis satanica potestas, omnis incursio infernalis adversarii, omnis legio, omnis congregatio et secta diabolica, in nomine et virtute Domini Nostri Jesu Christi, eradicare et effugare a Dei Ecclesia, ab animabus ad imaginem Dei conditis ac pretioso divini Agni sanguine redemptis._

If he repeated it enough times, it might even make up for all the time that it had never even come up. _If demons are so important, then dad should’ve told me earlier_ , Dean mused. _Why shouldn’t he have? Did he think I was never going to run into them at all_?

 _There are usually only one or two demonic occurrences each year_ , Dad had said with grim eyes and a set mouth. It hadn’t been a huge consideration before, but...

 _We exorcise you_ , Dean went over the translation, _every impure spirit, every satanic power, every incursion of the infernal adversary, every legion, every congregation and diabolical sect._ _Every satanic power_ , but didn’t that imply some opposite? It seemed unfair to have a hell and not a heaven—that demons could infiltrate the earth and possess people, but that people should not have the aid of another force—how patently unbalanced it was. So the world would always be biased against hunters, Dean decided bitterly, but there was no reason for them to stop fighting. Else the evil would come for them, and who would be there to protect the innocent?

(He wondered, too: And who would be there to protect the protectors?

At any rate, they were used enough to protecting themselves: that was the only thought of consolation.)

The porch gave them away almost immediately—the wooden planks creaked like an old man’s groans, _creak creak creak creak_ when Dad, first in the line, set his foot on the lowest step.

“How creative,” Cas mused, her gaze traveling over the wood with a scrutiny that Dean thought was a bit overboard. “There’s no reason for you two to be sneaky,” she said to John Winchester. “You two are hunters—you should feel free to go straight on in. I’ll wait elsewhere.”

Dean blinked. “Wait, where are you—“

(“I went through all the databases I can access,” Bobby had said over the phone. “Did some different search key phrases, the whole round. And not a single person who goes by the name of Castiel popped up in results. You sure that’s her birth name?”

“I’m not sure about anything, Bobby. That’s what she said her name was. But if she’s lying, how the hell am I supposed to be able to read her mind and know the truth? That’s the kind of stuff she would pull off.”

“… You don’t let her out of your sight, Dean.”)

“Let her go,” Dad said bluntly. “Dean, come with me.” He waited until Cas had walked back down a ways, behind a cluster of trees and out of sight, before he knocked on the door— _creak creak creak creak_ went the door—and bawled out, “Danny Elkins! Winchester here, stopping by. You’re home, aren’t you?”

Dean could hear some noise from inside, before Elkins pulled the door open. _Damn, he’s a real downer_ , was his first thought. Elkins had a face which was drawn long and lean, his cheekbones harsh under his skin. The skin around his eyes was wrinkled, with his mouth curved in a permanent scowl and his jaw thrust out pugnaciously. He looked like he’d had a hard life, and made of it what he could with a frown and a grimace out of necessity.

“Elkins,” Dad said, tipping him a nod. “This is my son, Dean. We were passing through and just figured I’d stop by to say hi.”

“Winchester,” Elkins said. His voice grated like the sound of wheels on gravel— _you’d think he would drink more to smooth out his throat_ , thought Dean, _or maybe he already does it and it’s not enough._ All this last name business, too—Caleb, Pastor Jim, Bobby, they all had the honor of being addressed by the first name, even Bobby who had threatened to run John off his property so long ago and since then insulted him as a professional would—but this Elkins, who Dad said he had learned from as a mentor, still went by Elkins and not Daniel. It didn’t seem all that warm of a greeting.

 _Of course_ , Dean thought, shooting a quick glance at his dad. _He’s the original. Just passing it down the line here_.

Elkins seated them on a rather old sagging couch in the living room; came out from the kitchen with a tray and three glasses placed on top, each filled with liquid. When Dean took one of the glasses, said, “Thanks, looks good,” and took a swig, the warm burn of bourbon crawled down his throat and into his stomach, happily purring there.

“Whoa, this is pretty good,” he said. “What kind?”

“Ten High,” Elkins grunted. “But not the new stuff. I’ve got the old kind all stacked up in the back. That new swill they call bourbon’s watered down—disgusting—and they scam you out of your money like there’s no tomorrow.”

“You heard from Rufus Turner recently? Johnny Walker fanatic.” John Winchester sagged back into his seat, just like the couch itself; and said, “Says he ran into a rogue vampire or two a few weeks back, who were feeding off animal blood instead of humans.”

“That’s horseshit,” Elkins scoffed.

“Well, you’re the vampire specialist,” Dad conceded. Dean frowned, looked to the side—it was so rare he ever saw his father buttering up someone else (as much as he could) that the very hint of it was surprising. Last time he’d seen it happen, the woman (also, in fact, a young shifter who apparently wasn’t all that clever) had ended up dead as a rock, and just as cold. It hadn’t made her body any harder to destroy, though.

“So I was wondering,” Dean broke in, “you specialize in demons too?”

When Elkins turned his attention upon Dean it was calculating, like a predator eyeing its prey. “And what kind of demon are you thinking of?”

“Kind?”

“John, you need to talk to your son more,” Elkins grumbled.

“Elkins, we’re not here to quarrel,” Dean heard his dad say—and wasn’t that always a precursor to a move. Dean showed his hands, empty—said, “Dude, we just need the Colt, okay? You keep saying you don’t have it, but it’s not like you’re that good of a liar. We already know when and where this demon’s gonna hit, and you aren’t letting us use it just because—”

“And if you fail, the Colt goes to the demons,” snapped Elkins. He leaned forward, agitated; even in the half-lit room Dean could see the knuckles whiten. “Good job there, Winchester. As if you succeed in all your cases—"

“You think I’d let that demon _live_?” Dad spat _demon_ like a curse, and surely he meant it.

“It’s not about what you let happen,” Elkins said, his eyes two pinpricks of light. “It’s what you make happen, and truthfully, Winchester, I don’t think—"

The staff clouted him in the head so forcefully that he went spinning to the side, crashed into the shelf, and collapsed like a puppet cut from its strings.

Dad remained unmoved.

“What the fuck, Cas!” Dean started forward and snagged her wrist, pulling her over. “He was gonna say yes sooner or later, we could’ve worked on him longer—"

“He wouldn’t have said yes. He lacked faith.” Cas didn’t even look at Dean, did not meet his eyes at all; instead, she looked past him to Dad and addressed him like an accomplice. “You can crack the safe easily.”

“Can’t just pull the combination number out of his head, can you?” But then Dad smiled, his lips bloodless and set hard. No mirth at all, only the grimness that came with ugly satisfaction. “We shouldn’t have much trouble with that. Good job, Cas.”

“We needed to save time,” she said simply; still didn’t look at Dean, though he had her by the bony spindles she presumed to call wrists and hadn’t let go. Her face was flushed from exertion, and though once Dean would’ve joked about a crush he had discovered by now that there was something about him which Cas truly could not stand for long, so it could only be the physical effort of her swing. He couldn’t tell if it was accompanied by shame.

It was discomforting, Dean thought, the ends to which Cas went. He hadn’t fully realized till now that his father was fine with it that way.

And oh, fuck, he remembered—Cas turned her head up and focused on him, finally, and she was bloody psychic and touching her was definitely not blocking her out—he released his hold like he’d been branded by a hot iron.

Cas looked at him, but as always Dean was never sure she was seeing him. “You must understand, Dean,” she told him. “It’s for your brother, and for you. Worse things could happen,” and it sounded like neither a threat nor a warning.

It sounded, rather, like she already knew.

*

Sam dreamed:

And there—the jugular going flutter flutter. The demon dipped his knife in the blood and drew all over his homework for shits and giggles. Lovely picture, said Lucifer; hummed and continued, but you should show off your art, it’s a pity you didn’t plan ahead. My bad, he replied shamelessly. Waggles his fingers, slick with fluid. I got impatient and started off with the eyes this time.

Lucifer watched, and smiled. Sam screamed. The lizards in his stomach were biting each others’ tails off now, just a chomp and—

Don’t worry, Sam, you really shouldn’t worry so. We’ll have a great time together.


	3. out of our flesh

_She finds her sister in a small house outside Tulsa, miles away from the ruin of Camp Chitauqua. “You look kinda sick, ma’am. Are you okay? Are you here to see the doctor?” asks a young girl who accosts her on the street. Her tan skin bears the scabs of sores healed over. “She’s really nice! And she’s got the prettiest hair!”—and skipping down the road, she warbles, “Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens—“ Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, Claire adds. The girl’s voice resounds like a clear silver bell, alien in its impossible happiness, and Castiel thinks to herself, Once upon a time, she could have been someone great. Just like everyone else._

_No one presumes to be of grand stature in a croat-ridden world. But Anna Milton very nearly is. When she opens the door, she looks like no angel—her hair is tied back into a shapeless bun that slouches to the side; a raised scar runs along her left cheekbone and follows the path of a dagger slash; her body is covered in dust and sweat and streaked with the blood of a patient. Before her escape from Heaven, her wings had been flayed to tatters. But in her face Castiel can still see something left of her grace._

_“Anael,” she says. “Anna.” Anna, Dean is dead, she opens her mouth again to say, but only silence uncoils from her tongue, cold and slow like a sinuous snake._

_The world is dead._

_Anna holds the door open wider. “Come in, Castiel,” she murmurs._

_Castiel steps forward. In the dark circles of Anna’s irises, she can see her own reflection, and the grayness of despair._

*

Traditional Big Bang theory implies a curved heterogeneous universe when it is in fact flat and homogeneous - explanation derived from inflationary universe model → chaotic inflation theory

**dude, do you understand any of this?**

STOP WRITING ON MY NOTES, PETER.

The idea of bubble universes is derived from chaotic inflation theory - quantum fluctuations causing false (lower-energy) or true progeny vacuums - find a starting point and from there expand (like last night?)

**WHOA. Last night yeahhhh**

STOP INSINUATING. god you’re so dirty. just a dream I had last night. I dreamed I helped my sister turn time inside-out. It was pretty creepy.

**you don’t have a sister, Milton.**

THANKS FOR STATING THE OBVIOUS, mr. brainiac.

[cosmology notes marginalia, Anna Milton]

*

She hated biology. Meiosis, mitosis, whatever. Ms. Price was nice, but too slow when teaching her lessons in class and too easy on the students who whispered and threw spitballs around in the back of the room. The homework wasn’t any more interesting. She groaned and let her head thunk heavily against the textbook.

She’d been having trouble concentrating, for a while.

The hair on her neck rose slowly and she looked up—saw a shape through the window, a still figure on the sidewalk.

The girl started forward, walking up to their front door, maybe to sell subscriptions or publicize a fundraiser. (That made sense; the church was getting ready for the upcoming annual Thanksgiving dinner and charity raffle.) She scooted her chair to the side and squinted, guessed that she was older, like she was in high school. Probably a fundraiser.

She got up from the table as the doorbell rang. Turned the doorknob, pulled the door open, and looked into eyes as blue as her own. The girl’s cheekbones showed prominently under skin pulled tight with exhaustion, and her jeans looked like they’d been ripped and sewn back together.

Or not a fundraiser after all.

“Hi,” she said cautiously.

“Hello,” replied the girl; she stared at her and didn’t blink. The dark circles under her eyes stood out starkly against pale skin, smudges curving under limp eyelashes and washed-out blue irises.

Claire shuffled her feet and stood up straighter. “Um,” she said. There’s a shelter three streets over, she recalled. Daddy volunteered in the kitchens there. “Can I help you with something?”

“Yes,” the girl said. “It’ll only take a moment. Are your parents here?”

“Um.” Claire bit her lip. You don’t talk to strangers about stuff like that, she thought. But the silence stretched out too long for her answer to be seen as a truthful reaction. “Mom’s in the back,” she said, “if there’s anything important—”

“No,” said the girl. “Nothing to you. You don’t need to know. Or remember. I just wanted to see my parents again. Before tonight.”

She looked very grave and tired but her hand came up sharply and did not tremble as she rested two fingers against Claire’s forehead, and pressed down.

The darkness embraced her like a lover, but Claire could hear, very distantly, the flutter of wings.

*

“Just turn the engine off,” Reidy muttered to Victor as they sat in the car. Victor leaned forward, twisted the key sharply to the left—and silence suffused the car like chloroform.

They sat there, their breathing even. Reidy propped his elbow on the door of the car and stared out into the alley next to Winchester and Moore’s apartment. Victor kept his eyes on the door, barely visible from his angle.

It wasn’t a stake out he could trust to the local police, though he’d alerted them to be in the area and ready to go. He would not give people the misfortune of dealing with the Winchesters; and, frankly, he would not deny himself the grim satisfaction of being the one to box them in, hound them like they hounded others to their deaths, the slick beatings and stabbings and periodic bouts of grave desecration.

How strange, he thought, the divergence in experience and belief. He did not remember his mother well—only six years old when she was killed. A fired worker had not taken the news of his dismissal well at all, and had returned to the workplace with a gun in hand. It had been her bad luck to be cleaning out that day—the man could not have cared whether he was aiming at a manager or at a janitor or at a secretary or at a maid. _What a terrible thing_ , the neighbors had whispered. _Poor husband. Poor child_.

_Poor mom_ , Victor thought. _We both idealized you too much for you to be human._

They had no way of restitution, since the matter was a massacre and a suicide. Instead Victor had watched his father spiral downward into alcohol and drugs and despair—and who else was there to take care of him but Victor himself? He had been a latch key kid a generation off, both sets of grandparents already passed on their own ways to death. He could not pinpoint his saving grace, what had separated him from the hundreds of other kids across the city schools of Baltimore: that ineffable quality which had pushed him to join law enforcement rather than the dealers on the streets. It had been a liberating decision to become a member of law, and protect those who could not protect themselves—and if not, to take justice.

A liberating decision, but also an imprisoning one. A thankless job, for the most part—there were the cases that went years without a tip, or the cases with tips that went unsolved, or the cases with known perpetrators who—simply—could not—be—caught. Victor closed his eyes and breathed. And there was too the mistrust from his own origins; the old neighbors spoke of little Victor with some respect and more wariness, while the street kids did not look him in the face. And he knew that if he stopped and addressed someone that the person would suffer for it.

_The best I can do_ , he thought, the best he could do was to go after the criminals in the world. Winchester—what a life. He must have been twisted by his father’s grief all his life, that security of stability and home snatched from him on a moment’s whim. From school to school, the endless grind, and all the while transforming into the very disciple of his father. It was a wonder Sam Winchester had not turned out the same—or so it appeared. He looked up at the door again.

“Victor,” Reidy hissed quietly. “Someone in the alleyway!”

“Fuck,” Victor muttered. He clicked the door open very, very carefully. In the shadows he could barely make out any outlines—but there—a man straightened his back, oh so quietly, and turned to walk into the dark, the lines of his body vanishing from their sight. “Someone else is on a stake-out too then, looks like,” he said. “You follow him, I’ll go check out the apartment. Got you covered.”

“Right at you,” Reidy tossed back. He smiled then, the curve of his mouth brilliant and slow under the street light. “We always do.”

*

The door clicked open audibly. Sam turned from where he’d been talking to Brady and Jess, saw through the glass pane into the hallway—

He nearly slipped on the floor while turning the corner. “What the fuck are you doing here?” he hissed. “Dean?” And then: “ _Dad_?”

“Looking good, Sam,” Dean said, clapping him on the shoulder oh so casually, as if the last time they had seen each other Dean had not walked out and gunned up the Impala to leave and Sam had not broken a plate on the table.

Sam turned into the touch of his brother’s hand and hugged him tightly, then broke away and stared at Dean, then over Dean’s shoulder at his father. “Dad?”—and he was embarrassed to hear his voice crack—he’d chosen to leave whole-heartedly, he was not about to start—his eyes itched.

“Sam, you're in danger,” John said gruffly, and added, “The demon who killed your mother is in the area.”

“Wait— _what_?” What the fuck kind of greeting that was, Sam wanted to know. What had killed their mother—they’d hunted demons so rarely before that he could barely summon any details to mind, as much as he had retained most of his hunting knowledge. “You—you can’t just come in. My girlfriend and my friend are both here, you’re both on the FBI wanted list, the agents won’t miss the fact there’s a mysterious truck parked nearby—”

“Three streets over,” Dean said, and gave Sam a thumbs up.

Sam whipped his head around to glare at him. “They’ve got to have this place on stake-out!”

“Sam? What’s the matter?”

Sam squeezed his eyes shut. Fuck.

Brady loped over to the front door. “Geez, Sam, I know you’re happy to bring in stray puppies, but even these?”

“Hey!” Dean said. “What the hell—”

“Who’s this, Sam?” John asked.

Sam gritted his teeth. They had no idea. They couldn’t just waltz in and say hello, they had to do so with witnesses inside and FBI agents almost certainly in the area. _You need to get out of here_ , he thought desperately. _Henriksen’s been on your trail for ages_. “This is a friend of mine, Brady,” he said. “Brady, this is my brother and my dad—”

“Oh, I knew that.” Brady clucked his tongue, exaggerated amusement in the sound. “You're all too nice to me, bringing yourselves here.”

_What are you talking about_ , Sam mouthed, and then realized that his voice would not work.

Dean made a muffled sound and an aborted attempt at lunging; John’s face was livid with anger.

_Brady_ , Sam thought, _no, not Brady_ , and then Brady turned to him with eyes that pooled black like twin oil spills, the shiny black film creeping across the whites of Brady’s eyes, and Sam could not stand to deny the reality anymore. _Oh god, Jess_.

“Sam? Brady?”

_First mistake_ , Sam thought grimly as the silence stretched on. _Brady, you forgot to keep the charade up_ —

— _wham_! Sam felt the force whiplash through his body as he hit the wall, barely missing the frame next to him. He tried to turn his head to the side, against the demon’s force—saw Dean out of the corner of his eye. _We never really went up against demons before_ , he thought in blind panic. _Jess, no, Jess, get out of here, you’re the only one who has no experience, you shouldn't be involved in this at all—_

She came around with an iron pan held in one hand and a can of pepper spray in the other—swung at Brady and hit him full in the face with both metal and a flurry of pepper. “What the fuck are you doing, Brady?” she shrieked— _damn_ , thought Sam, _but her reflexes have always been good_.

Jess smashed the pan into Brady’s face again before it flew out of her hands, but Brady’s control had slipped, just for a moment—and his dad shot him in the shoulder. Brady doubled over with a grimace. “Salt,” he hissed, “goddamn.”

This time when his eyes spilled over with black ink, Jess saw. Sam heard her barely audible gasp—her face cleared over, the slick shine of cold steel, as she brought the spray can down on Brady’s nose. “Don’t know what you’re doing, Brady,” she said, “but you’ve been fucking with me? _Don’t you dare touch my boyfriend_ —“

The shotgun cracked again—and again—the rounds hit Brady in the stomach, the collarbone, and Sam saw the salt dash itself over his friend’s body, not-Brady cringing back; heard Dean's voice rising above the tumult: " _Exorcizamus te—uh, omnis immundus spiritus—_

Sam abruptly slid down the wall like a marionette. Dad tackled Brady down, smashing his knee into nose and mouth. "You stay down," he grunted.

Brady stared up at them through the blood trickling into his eyes. "Ya bunch o' bastards," he spat out.

Dad stared back coldly. "Dean, rope."

"How'd you," Sam began, struggling to his feet, but didn't continue. Jess grasped the back of his neck tightly, pulled his head down and kissed him, her tongue flicking lightly against his lips—then drew back and turned around with her pepper spray aimed at Dean. "Who the fuck are you?" she snapped.

Dad ignored her entirely. Dean let go of Brady's bindings and showed his hands, palm up. "Nice to meet you," he said irrepressibly, as if he wasn't a total stranger to her and was just enjoying some quality bondage time with rope. "I'm Dean, Sam's brother. This here's his dad. You're—"

"Sam's my boyfriend," Jess said bluntly. "You're Dean?" She glanced back at Sam for confirmation, who dropped his head in a nod. "I don't know what's wrong with my friend, but you've got nerve to barge in here and—and—" The fire had faded from her eyes. "Sam," she said, her voice wavering, "I don't know what's wrong with Brady. His eyes went _black_."

It'd only been a few minutes, Sam thought blankly. Just a few minutes and his family and his past hunting life had been blown open like a storm. What was there to say? He opened his mouth, but could not find the words—stood there, instead, like a man on trial. _I plead the fifth_ , he said to himself dazedly. But this was no place for a lawyer.

It was Dean who spoke, Dean the saving grace. "Wasn't your friend, sorry," he said, and sounded like he cared. "He's possessed by a demon. Sam," and he flicked his eyes to his younger brother, "this is the demon who killed Mom."

"What?" Sam managed. "How would you know?"

"We're with a psychic, she said he was after you. Finish what he started, I guess."

"No." Dad suddenly looked up. "She's lying. His eyes are black."

"But Cas said—"

"I don't trust her, you don't trust her. Or she could be wrong. But that other demon's definitely around here, that much I've confirmed from the omens."

Dean bit his lower lip; said, "Sam. Look, we'll bundle him up and get him outta here, okay? No wacky stuff at your place, we got it."

"Wait—you can't just _leave_!" Sam grabbed Dean by the shoulder, Dad a brooding shape behind him. "If I'm in danger, Jess is in danger—you don't leave without giving us a goddamn explanation!"

"A _demon_?" Jess said disbelievingly. "Brady can be a total fucker sometimes, but a demon?"

"We'll call you, Sam," Dad spoke up. "This guy's out." He didn't mention Brady's unconsciousness, but an empty sedative syringe dangled in his hand. "Where's Cas?"

"I don't know, she said she would just get in the way. Where's a psychic when you need them?" Dean snorted. "Sam, just trust us, all right?"—he opened the front door, said, "I'll explain it to you later, promise"—

—and went very still, the muzzle of a gun against his head.

"Or," said Agent Henriksen, emerging from the shadow of the hallway, "you can explain it to me now, before I charge you with murder."

*

The gun kissed the side of his head, steady and hard. Dean slanted a look over, saw it was the agent who'd talked to him in the Illinois prison—his last name had been something like Henry? Ericsen? If nothing else, he remembered his first name, and using that was sure to piss him off more.

"Heya, Victor," he said breezily. "Didn't know you liked me so much to chase after me."

He felt the agent dig the gun in just a bit more. "Didn't realize you liked to be chased."

"Agent Henriksen!" Sam broke in. "Don't—don't shoot, I can explain, I swear. I know it wasn't my brother, if—"

"You're very good at not telling lies," Agent Henriksen said, sharp and curt. "But not good enough. Winchester, you hurt that boy anymore and I will take care of your son. You understand, I'm sure. The police are coming." Dean could hear someone coming down the hallway. One pair of footsteps though, he figured, so Henriksen was totally bluffing.

"No!" Sam snapped. "Look, Agent, Brady was going after us all—"

"Right, your good friend was attacking you while your estranged family members—under suspicion of murder, arson, and I can't even name all the others—were here to help you. What are you going to say next, he killed your mom?"

" _What?_ " said Sam's girlfriend. Jess, Dean remembered. She stepped away from all of them—Sam included. She looked absurdly small in her sweatpants and large sports jersey, but her face was dark with wariness.

Dean couldn't see the look on Sam's face, though he saw his brother stiffen. He wasn't sure he wanted to.

The footsteps stopped. "False alarm," came a man's voice. "That guy in the alleyway, I mean."

Dean wrinkled his nose.

“Reidy!” Henriksen snapped, the relief barely visible in his eyes. “Help me—”

“You’ve done me a great favor today,” the other man murmured. “You and your partner both—"

—Dean choked, smacked against the door jamb and dropped like a pile of bricks. An invisible hand had wrapped itself around his windpipe. Fuck, he'd rather have the gun. Heard the table screech sharply across the floor, a sudden displacement of air like a bird's landing.

"Get away!" he heard Sam yelling. "Dean! _Dad_!"

"Oh my god," Jess said. "Oh my god, Sam, your dad—"

And heard, again, "Dean!" Castiel's voice, a young girl's gone hoarse.

"Cas," he gasped. "Where you been?" And where the hell had she come from? He strained to turn his head but couldn't see Dad. Dad, he tried to say, that demon's here—and you've got the Colt—

Henriksen was scrabbling against the floor for something to hold. "Reidy," he gritted, "what the fuck are you up to—"

The man blinked, his eyes rolling into an acid yellow color. Henriksen went silent, his body suddenly locking down to the linoleum beneath. "I think this body's younger than the other one," the yellow-eyed demon mused. "Quite nice. And you, you're the one who's been tracking me in your dreams?"

"Azazel," Cas said.

"You've been a real pest to me." But the yellow-eyed demon frowned as he made a dismissive gesture. Cas didn't budge an inch. "Very interesting," he said. "You smell strange."

Cas didn't speak. Dean grimaced; managed to look to the side. Jess was collapsed next to Sam, who stared straight back at Dean, shifted his hand. The demon wasn't paying attention.

The gun, Dean mouthed. Dad's gun. Where's Dad?

"Do you have a tongue?" the demon asked casually. "Or if so, shall I rip it out of you to hear you speak?"

Sam slowly looked to his right, Dean following his gaze.

Oh fuck, Dad. The glass of the picture frame had smashed against his head, had fallen like confetti over his face. The blood spread out over his nose and mouth like the tributaries of a stream. But he's not dead, Dean thought wildly. Because Dad doesn't die. Can't die.

"You won't leave this place tonight," Cas said softly. "Do you remember what you used to be? And what _I_ am?"

Dad can't die, he repeated. Mouthed at Sam— _get the fucking gun—get it_ —

"Look over here, boy," the demon said. "Who's your friend here?" And Dean felt his neck wrenched around like it would fall, his jaw banging against the wall. Looked over. Saw:

"I've been tracing you," the demon said. "But you wouldn't be found. The Winchesters wouldn't be found."

"So basically the FBI's a hell of a lot smarter than you are," Dean said, clenching his teeth; stared at the floor. Victor Henriksen looked back at him. Dean didn't know who the fuck the possessed man was, but Henriksen had clearly known and recognized him—FBI or something like that? Henriksen looked sick and enraged all at once.

"You have no idea who I am." And Cas—

—disappeared—

—appeared—

—behind the demon, slapped her hand against his back—

—"but I know who you are. And how to make you _weak_." Her eyes were—

—glowing, Dean stared and checked but her eyes were brightening, two twin stars, both looking straight at him as the blue of her eyes whitened out—

—and dimmed—

—and the demon threw its head back and laughed. "I think, you sad little angel," he said, "that it's you who's the weak one."

The bullet struck him right between the eyes.

*

“Get an ambulance!” the FBI agent was shouting into the phone. Jess could barely make out his face through the blurriness of her tears. “Now! We have four casualties. Three unconscious, one—" his voice trembled for a moment "—one dead."

Jess stared at the body. Only a minute before, the agent had been screaming. Reidy, he'd said, Reidy, Jesus fucking Christ, Reidy.

"Sam," she said hollowly. "You killed him."

"... I killed the demon possessing him," Sam said.

"But you killed him too."

Sam rested his hand at the back of her neck. Jess thought for a moment, but decided to lean into his touch. "Yeah," Sam said. His words dropped softly into the air; he let the antique gun dangle limply from his hand. "I did."

Sam's brother Dean was bent over their father, carefully picking away at the glass. He raised his head to look once at Sam, an expression of relief sharply drawn upon his face, before turning his attention back down.

"You never told me," she said. "About any of this."

"I didn't think—" Sam dropped his hand away from her. "I didn't think you'd believe me. I didn't want to bring it here."

Jess watched the agent take Reidy's hands and arrange them on his chest. "... You're right," she said. "I wouldn't have believed you."

"Jess—"

She shook her head. The agent stood up; when he walked over to them, he was the very paragon of sobriety, so it was only when she squinted that she could see the redness around his eyes.

"Agent Henriksen," Sam said. "I'll—"

"Explain it later," Henriksen said heavily. "I don't want to explain why my partner is dead." He looked away. "You'll all be under surveillance at the hospital," he said. "You understand."

"For the safety of others," Sam replied. "And for our own."

"Yes." Henriksen didn't add anything else, but left in Dean's direction.

"... you'll have to ask your brother what sedative they gave Brady," Jess said.

Sam bit his lip. "We have to exorcise him first—"

"And not the other guy who's dead?"

Sam didn't answer.

"And the girl, she's—I don't know, she's not responding right now. Not even unconscious reflexes are kicking in, Sam, I just don't know—"

"They'll tell us at the hospital," Sam interrupted. "I—I'm sorry."

Jess looked down then, at the shattered glass, the rough streaks and drops of blood across the floor. She shifted to grasp Sam's hand in her own.

"I still love you," she said. "And you and I, we're alive."

*

Claire, Castiel says. We're finished. Azazel is dead. He'll never lead Sam or any of the others to the gates of Hell. And you saw your parents, right?

She hears no reply. But she goes on, And Dean's alive. No one knows that the world has not been changed from the old future. There will be no need for me to speak to your father. Your younger self will be happy, won't she?

Of course she will, she says. How can she not? All she'll worry about is classes and sleepovers and never matters of life or death. Claire. We're done.

Are you tired?

Castiel coils herself up, remembers when she could see the superstrings tucked into pockets of space like miniature time capsules. Now she sees little but a quietly sweeping blackness.

I wonder, she says, if you'll see Heaven again.

*

This was the last time Sam had a dream of the end of the world:

He was sitting alone in a car. The car was not the Impala; its ends were rounded, its insides more sleek, the automatic lock snapping into place at the press of a button. It was not the messenger which carried the initials SW and DW along like a arrow to the end of time; he had carjacked it from a parking lot, had siphoned gas without shame when necessary, had dented the fender and never once bothered to fix it. It was an object of no particular import to him, and now it could no longer move.

He turned the key again, heard the engine rally weakly once, twice. Then it sputtered like a stopped up pipe and coughed its last.

“Fuck,” Sam said. He slumped in his seat and pressed his forehead to the steering wheel. It was hard to come by any driving vehicles these days, or spare tires, or spare engine parts. Bobby’s place had been ransacked the last time he’d visited, after the last time he’d called Bobby, and Bobby had not answered. He still didn’t know where he was, or Dean, or anyone.

“You shouldn’t give up just yet,” said the person in the front seat next to him. His voice was strangely high and yet low at once, a collection of tones overlaid upon one another like the sunlit hues of the insides of an oyster shell. When Sam looked to his side he saw a girl bowing her bright blonde head, raising a small hand to touch the side of her neck, and then the vision resolved itself into an older dark-haired man, carefully untangling his tie from its knot.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Sam said. Bobby’s place was perfectly intact, wasn’t it? The last time he’d been there was many years ago, but he had heard no ill news of Bobby and his communications and information hub.

He glanced out the window at the dying grass. They had grown mottled sickly yellow and twisted over and died like trampled ribbons under the sun, no rain to relieve their pain, and the wind blew up dust like a hurricane hitting land. He sat in the eye and hunched his shoulders forward, looked away from the image and blocked it out of his mind.

“I don’t speak of specifics, Sam,” said the man. He faded in and out of existence, the man’s features softening to the girl’s features and back again. “I don’t know if I’ll have the strength to help you and your brother anymore. I have spent all that I could give. I know someone else who can help—my sister—but she won't know it herself for a while."

“It’s not so bad.” Sam frowned and squinted, trying to keep his eyes on the person next to him. When he reached forward to grab the girl’s wrist, it twisted and slipped out of his grasp like a rush of cold air. “I don’t—if you could explain. The thing that killed my mom—it’s dead, isn’t it? We’re done with that.”

“There are more things in heaven and hell, Sam, then are dreamt of in all your lives,” the man said. “Now that I have met you in this time, and in others past—you have always tried to do what is right, but you haven't always succeeded. Your brother, too. And me.”

“And who are you?”

“If you remember—I was named Castiel. Your brother once called me Cas.”

“You can just call him Dean, you know.” Dean, he had said, and his brother’s name slipped down into his gut and stuck there, unable to be dislodged. A wave of misery swept over him and sank into the sockets of his eyes, the weight drawing in all the aches in his head till it became concentrated around his eyes. His sight blurred. Dean was not here—this was not the Impala—but no. Dean had just met Jess. They had hit it off excellently, they’d both come to Sam—Sam paused, tried the name on his tongue: “Cas. Castiel. That’s the psychic’s name.”

The man—Castiel—turned his face away. “You don’t know me in this time,” he said, then tossed her blonde hair back, long and healthy like a horse’s mane, as if she had not cut it short, her face filled out like a child’s instead of the brittle structure Sam suddenly recalled. “Dean doesn’t know me in this time. I did not expect you to, but.” She stopped then—pulled his trench coat tightly around himself, and went on: “I've done all that I could. I did it because I had faith. That this—" he pointed out, across the farmland along the highway, where the hay bales had blown away in the hurricane winds and the smell of cow dung rose up unbidden, rank and strong “—this will not happen. That you humans will save yourselves. I can still believe.”

“In what?”

Castiel fixed her gaze on him, silently, but didn’t answer the question. She said, instead, “Will you tell your brother something, for me?”

“If I remember,” Sam said, “I can definitely do that.”

“I'm too weak. I don’t know if I'll be able to return and see you again,” she said. “Perhaps in this lifetime, perhaps in the time beyond. And with the demon Azazel gone, and your father alive, this should never happen—

“—but tell Dean that he is worth raising from Hell. For neither of you are among the damned. I learned this a long time ago.”

“What?” Sam said. “Of course we’re not damned—we’re all worth something, right? What would we be damned for?”

“If that is what you believe,” Castiel said quietly, “and Dean too—then that is all I wanted.”

Then the eye of the hurricane passed, the wind leaping through the windows and drawing glass shards into a lethal swirl, but Castiel reached out and she smiled very faintly and pressed his hand to Sam’s forehead—

 

In the hospital room, the light fell through the window in a soft weave of gilded gossamer. Sam opened his eyes; listened to the sound of his father's breathing. Next to him, Dean snored, and Jess tucked her head into his shoulder like a nesting bird.

He could see outside, and above his head the rising sun shone bright as a coin, the color of polished gold.


End file.
